Your hashtag strategy should change!

Published March 4, 2015 at 7:49 am

Anyone who has used Twitter may have noticed subtle changes over the years in the way it operates. With more people aware of how it works, businesses have to be more adept at the different means that Twitter-based tools are used for nowadays. One of the most fundamental is the hashtag: we’ve touched upon it before on this blog, but let’s look a little more deeply into what a business should do to make a hashtag marketing success.

Writing for The Telegraph, Chris Price outlines some of the basic principles of proper hashtag use to engage customers in social media. He writes that engaging with followers and other users promotes the brand and creates users who could spread good words about the company’s campaign. Once there’s a strong market, the hashtag could give some form to a Twitter campaign by grouping it in a certain category.

However, businesses need to be wary of using hashtags too much or incorrectly, especially now that Twitter users are likely more familiar with them. Price says that businesses should avoid using more than one hashtag at a time per tweet, for example, and always pick a hashtag that is relevant to the overall message.

Forbes contributor Denise Lee Yohn calls hashtags “the new ‘like'” and says they always need to be used with engagement in mind for the best results.

“Hashtags — like likes — are only as valuable as the engagement they produce,” she writes. “And just because someone uses your hashtag in a tweet or post doesn’t mean they are engaged with your brand.  Hashtags should be used less as a message and more as a call to action that leads to greater brand engagement.”

Integrating an understanding of the most current ways of using tools like hashtags into automatic marketing could make it stronger and more tied to real users.